Monthly Notes

Briefly Noted December 2013


Left-wing ACORN wannabe groups may soon get their hands on as much as $4 billion after the Obama administration strong-armed JP Morgan into coughing up $13 billion to make up for alleged deficiencies in mortgage securities the bank sold. If JP Morgan fails to burn through the full $4 billion by the end of 2016, left-wing pressure groups are likely to receive the cash.

The undercover videographer who helped to kill ACORN is now turning his powerful lens on Obamacare “navigators,” showing how left-wing groups break the law and defraud taxpayers. The undercover investigators of Project Veritas, the nonprofit created by ACORN slayer James O’Keefe III, are going after the almost 50,000 Obamacare “navigators” to whom the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is paying more than $67 million for enrolling uninsured persons in Obamacare exchanges.

A video shows Obamacare promoters from the National Urban League in Texas telling insurance applicants to lie about pre-existing medical conditions. “You lie because your premiums will be higher,” one navigator tells an undercover journalist who claimed to be a smoker. “Don’t tell them that. Don’t tell ’em.” Another navigator adds, “Never report it.” ACORN-created United Labor Unions Local 100 in New Orleans is providing navigators in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas, as a sub-grantee of New Orleans-based Southern United Neighborhoods.

Tired of TV news broadcasts spewing pro-Obamacare propaganda? Prepare to be inundated with even more progressive proselytizing in the dramas and comedies that follow those news shows. That’s because the left-wing California Endowment is funding Obamacare public outreach efforts. With White House approval, University of Southern California’s Annenberg Norman Lear Center, which has something called a “Hollywood, Health & Society program,” accepted a $500,000 grant from the California Endowment to help TV producers condition the masses into supporting Soviet-style health care. USC will keep producers, writers, and directors up to speed so they can seamlessly weave the latest information into their storylines and help to generate public service announcements. The program, which also helps to spread Al Gore’s manmade global warming fantasies, boasts its “storytelling resources” have contributed to more than 550 “Hollywood, Health & Society-assisted storylines over the span of three years.”

That word you’re looking for is schadenfreude: MoveOn is rightly panicking over Obamacare as each day brings more news of high-tech bureaucratic bumbling on the malfunctioning HealthCare.gov website. On Nov. 15 MoveOn sent out a mass email to members: “There’s no sugar-coating it: Obamacare is in serious political trouble. And progressives need to step up and start fighting to save it right now.” The group that was founded to distract from President Bill Clinton’s extracurricular activities warns that “Republicans smell blood in the water. They think this is their chance to undo the whole thing. Worse yet, some Democrats in Congress are starting to waver too.”

Money can’t buy him love: New York mayor and billionaire liberal philanthropist Michael Bloomberg poured major bucks this election cycle into his group Mayors Against Illegal Guns, but the crusade flamed out spectacularly in last month’s elections. An incredible 23 members went down to defeat, including mayors Mike McGinn (Seattle), Lorenzo T. Langford (Atlantic City), Thomas S. Richards (Rochester), Patrick J. Morris (San Bernardino), Robbie Perkins (Greensboro, N.C.), Joshua J. Cohen (Annapolis), and James H. Suttle (Omaha). The mayors who took an electoral dirt nap were opposed by the National Rifle Association and represented more than 10 percent of the mayors’ group’s membership, according to Townhall’s Katie Pavlich.

Virginia House of Delegates member Barbara Comstock (R) beat back an aggressive challenge from Democratic challenger Kathleen Murphy, despite the fact that Bloomberg’s gun-grabbing group gave $100,000 to Murphy. Bloomberg was able to reduce Comstock’s margin of victory. She won by 422 votes out of 29,553 votes cast.

Matthew Vadum

The author of Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers (WND Books, 2011), Vadum, former senior vice president at CRC, writes and speaks widely…
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